Japan Professional Football League Optimizes Match Scheduling With ILOG Constraint Programming

ILOG Technology Radically Shortens Scheduling Time from Three Weeks to One
Day SUNNYVALE, Calif., May 28 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- ILOG(R) (Nasdaq:
ILOG; Euronext: ILO; ISIN: FR0004042364) announced today that Japan
Professional Football League, J. LEAGUE, utilizes ILOG Constraint Programming
(ILOG CP(R)) optimisation software system to optimize and streamline match
scheduling. Using the new system, J. league have been able to shorten
scheduling clip from three hebdomads to approximately one day. Optimal
scheduling have enabled J. league to fulfill the demands of the teams, fans
and supporters. The anchor of the J. league Match Scheduling System is ILOG CP, a
part of ILOG's market-leading suite of optimisation scheduling software
that usages restraint programming techniques to let J. league executives
to instantly measure and compare respective options before deciding on a final
schedule. ILOG JViews(TM), visual image software system from ILOG, is used to
provide a more than visually-appealing interface for the system. ILOG CP
supports time-based constraints that let organisations to generate
optimal agendas with precise activity start-and-stop times. J. conference is a top professional football game (soccer) league in Japanese Islands and
one of the most successful conferences in the Asiatic Football Confederation. The
organization recognized a demand to automate and streamline its complex match
scheduling process, involving 33 squads and 79 schedules, with a sum of
682 lucifers over a 10-month playing season. With no packaged application
available for complex scheduling, J. league decided on a usage approach
based on optimisation engineering from ILOG. Optimization betters business
decision devising velocity and efficiency by allowing organisations to calculate
the best use of existing resources -- in this case, squad personnel,
stadiums and spectators. Before using J. league Match Scheduler, all lucifer programming for the J.
LEAGUE was performed manually and therefore took on an norm two to three
weeks to finish owed to the complexness of the process. In deciding the
combination of lucifers and dates, schedulers needed to beguile many
different constraints. Such restraints include avoiding the programming of
a sequence of place games for a team, avoiding coincident place games of
teams sharing a place bowl or belonging to the same region, as well as
taking into consideration states of affairs where bowls are not available due
to care or other seasonal restrictions. These restraints also changed each twelvemonth owed to the former year's
match results, the addition or lessening in the figure of squads and specific
requirements of each team, increasing the complexness of programming even
further. With the former method of scheduling, the addition in the number
of squads was making it more than than and more hard for the schedulers to
handle. The new system was to guarantee a just agenda for all the teams,
while taking into business relationship each team's specific requests, such as as
availability of bowls and possible struggles of agendas. Custom developed by ILOG, the J. league Match Scheduler, the
proprietary lucifer programming software system of J. LEAGUE, now do it possible
to make agendas that are optimized to ran into the League's requirements,
taking into business relationship the countless restraints that demand to be considered
when programming series of games for a given season. "Arranging a lucifer agenda for 33 squads while appreciated such as complex
constraints to the fullest extent possible necessitates a considerable number
of simulations, and it was almost impossible to make so manually," said
Atsushi Kawasaki of J. LEAGUE. "ILOG CP and ILOG JViews, which were
incorporated into the J. league Match Scheduler, have got provided agendas of
the peak quality, while taking into consideration the basic scheduling
rules put by J. league and the numerous person petitions of each team. Also, ILOG is able to supply a high degree of support to pull off the changes
of the system needed to better the quality of our schedules. In addition
to a flexible technical support to pull off the agenda development task
that acquires more than than and more composite every year, we needed the highest
performance optimisation engineering available, which is why we selected
ILOG." More than 1,000 commercial customers, including 160 members of the
Global 500, usage ILOG optimisation tools, engines and applications to solve
the world's most ambitious planning and programming problems. These
customers include APL, BNSF, Junior East, Logistics, Maersk, Schneider, SNCF,
United Airlines, the United States Postal Service and UPS in transportation
and logistics; and Airbus, Coors, Dell, Hansol Paper, Michelin, Mitsubishi
Chemicals, Japan Steel, Nissan, Porsche, Saint Gobain, Thyssen Krupp, and
Toyota in manufacturing. ILOG optimisation merchandises are also used by a
majority of leading Supply Chain Management software system sellers including i2,
Infor, Manhattan Associates, JDA, Oracle, Red Prairie and SAP, as well as
in research programmes at over 1,000 universities around the world, making
the merchandises the "gold standard" for public presentation and solution quality in
the Operations Research community. For more than information, delight visit
. About ILOG ILOG presents software system and services that authorise clients to make
better determinations faster and pull off alteration and complexity. Over 3,000
corporations and more than than 465 prima software system system sellers trust on ILOG's
market-leading mercantile regulation direction system (BRMS), supply concatenation and
planning and programming applications, as well as its optimisation and
visualization software components, to accomplish dramatic tax returns on
investment, make market-defining products and services, and sharpen their
competitive edge. ILOG was founded in 1987 and uses more than than 850 people
worldwide. For more than information, delight visit ILOG, ILOG CP and ILOG JViews are registered hallmarks of ILOG S.A.
and ILOG, Inc. All other company and merchandise name calling are hallmarks of their
respective owners.